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The John Hickenlooper Exception

Hickenlooper, running for governor, took seven showers to get his TV ad against dirty politics just right.Credit
Photograph by Evan Semón

To appreciate what a peculiar political script John Hickenlooper has written for himself, you could start in any number of places, with any number of situations.

Up in the air. You could start there. It was 2005; he was in his first term as mayor of Denver and despite a lifelong fear of heights, he parachuted from a plane — twice, because the first time wasn’t sufficiently photogenic — for a television commercial supporting two voter referendums in Colorado to permit government spending that he considered vital, lest the state go into free fall. His landing was safe: one of the referendums passed, a result better than many political analysts had predicted. Onward he rolled to the next set of challenges, the next series of stunts.

He got into the shower. Fully clothed. It was last year; he was in his second term, had become a candidate for governor of Colorado and was making another TV ad, this one a lament about dirty politics and a pledge to conduct a clean campaign. He more or less made good on that promise and coasted to victory last November, an upbeat Democrat pitted against two angry Republicans, one running for a third party, who split the conservative vote. His inauguration is Jan. 11.

But for a proper introduction to his unabashed ways and eccentric means, you should probably go back many years before his formal entry into politics, to 1990, when he hatched a novel idea for promoting the second birthday of a downtown Denver microbrewery and restaurant, the Wynkoop Brewing Company, that he owned at the time.

He borrowed about 10 young, roughly 50-pound porkers from a local farmer, gathered them outside the restaurant and prodded them to scurry down a short alley and around the block, for an event that he described as a “running of the pigs.” Over subsequent years he repeated the event and it grew in popularity, drawing more notice and, perhaps inevitably, complaints from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

So he made an adjustment. He refashioned the swine stampede into the “pleasuring of the pigs.” The animals were coaxed along gently and coddled all the while. “We used parasols, little sun hats — we made sure there was no sun on the pigs,” he says. “People would feed the pigs little treats along the way.” Still, PETA representatives complained, telling Hickenlooper he was “objectifying and making a spectacle of pigs,” as he recalls. They videotaped one year’s pleasuring, he says, and “one pig caught its hoof in a grate and had a little drop of blood on its hoof.” To head off the dissemination of that image and put an end to PETA’s protests, he shelled out about $400 to buy all 14 pigs that had been used in that pleasuring and sent them to a refuge for rescued livestock, where they could grow fatter and older without fear of becoming bacon. And the next year, he says, with a sigh, “We did a celebration of prairie dogs.”

He was a few years shy of a political career at that point, but the politician was clearly in him, and many of the factors behind his emergence as the top Democrat in Colorado, a fractious political battleground and one of the country’s most glaringly purple states, were firmly in place. Hickenlooper has long had a knack for promoting himself, but in ways too clownish and just plain good-natured enough to come across as conventionally scheming. He’s a virtuoso goofball, and he’s much more inclined toward accommodation than confrontation. In the restaurant business, he often says, he adopted a philosophy that he has carried into other aspects of his life: there is no percentage, none at all, in making and motivating enemies.

Hickenlooper’s style has not only been fun-loving and freewheeling but also largely nonpartisan, and it has served him well. He decisively won election as mayor of Denver in July 2003, at the age of 51, despite no previous bids for elective office or experience in government. And he has had a remarkably successful administration, streamlining government, persuading voters to go along with a range of tax increases for projects like regional light rail and a new city jail and shepherding many homeless people off the streets and into newly built affordable housing. In 2005 Time magazine named him one of the five best big-city mayors in the country; in 2007 he won re-election with 87 percent of the vote. The pollster working on his 2010 gubernatorial campaign found that in the Denver metropolitan area roughly three of every four voters had a favorable impression of him. What Hickenlooper has enjoyed over the last seven and a half years isn’t so much a sustained political honeymoon as a round-the-world Love Boat cruise — with complimentary piña coladas nightly on the Lido Deck.

But can it last? Colorado is much more ideologically diverse than Denver itself, home to both the backpackers of Boulder and the Bible thumpers of Colorado Springs, and it’s in deep fiscal trouble. Hickenlooper will cross the lawn between City Hall and the State Capitol — they face each other across a picturesque park downtown — to encounter a budget shortfall of roughly $1 billion for the coming fiscal year and an obligation, written into Colorado law, to balance the books. Like chief executives far and wide, he must cut and cut and then cut some more, and he must do so in concert with a divided Legislature in which Democrats control the Senate and Republicans the House.

“Being governor of Colorado right now — it’s like trying to pick your teeth with a rattlesnake,” says Charlie Brown, a Denver City Council member and a onetime Democrat who switched his party registration years ago to “unaffiliated,” a group that represents about a third of Colorado’s voters. But he and others who have worked with or closely observed Hickenlooper say that his deft political touch up to now gives him as good a chance as anybody might have — and makes him especially interesting to watch.

Might there be a national example and lesson in his stubborn cheerfulness? Something that politicians elsewhere — mired for so long in the same old battles and grudges and confronted, as a result, with such profound voter cynicism — could use to their advantage?

“I think I can be beloved,” Hickenlooper told me when I visited Denver in mid-December. He smiled widely, but then he smiles widely all the time and laughs nearly as often. “Certainly,” he added, “I’m very needy, so we’ll give it our best try.”

The comment was classic Hickenlooper, a bit of braggadocio quickly leavened with self-deprecation. So was the setting. He leaned far back in the lone chair in a spartan barbershop wedged darkly into a third-floor corner of a building downtown, to get what he said might or might not be his official inauguration shearing, depending on the franticness of his schedule and the growth of his bangs. The cut’s cost: $25.

Hickenlooper revels in his image as someone utterly estranged from fashion and largely devoid of physical vanity. It’s part of his outsider’s cred. At a mayoral candidates’ forum in 2003, he wore a glen-plaid jacket with a yellow shirt and a paisley tie, and a line he used repeatedly with reporters at the time was that if he managed to become mayor, he’d have to go out and buy a proper suit. In his closet, he told them, he didn’t have anything that qualified.

During his gubernatorial campaign, he sent out a fund-raising letter, which one of its recipients gave me, that showcased a picture of a very young man in very bulky eyeglasses and what appears to be a madras jacket. “I know this looks like an audition photo for the movie ‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ but it’s actually my senior high-school picture,” the letter begins. “Looking back, I had the whole world in front of me. I could have been destined for the big screen, maybe even a modeling career.”

He’s kidding, of course, and like other instances of his gleeful self-mockery and buffoonery, it’s safe because there is so much countervailing evidence of polish and intelligence in him — because his haplessness is so obviously overstated. He’s 6-foot-1, slender, has a full head of economically cropped hair and doesn’t wear glasses anymore, thanks to Lasik surgery a dozen years ago. The high school mentioned in the letter is a private boys academy on the Philadelphia Main Line, and from there he went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he earned not only an undergraduate degree in English but also a graduate degree in geology.

Photo

John Hickenlooper at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.Credit
Photograph by Jeff Minton

He devours information and eagerly recycles it, a talker so voluble and digressive that he goes so far as to flag his frequent jaunts off topic. From one of my conversations with him: “I’ll digress.” From another: “To loop back to the beginning of the digression.” And from yet another: “Let me back up and create a context” — followed by “I’ve lost my train of thought.” I told his communications director, Eric Brown, that I could, and perhaps should, spend an entire evening trying to diagram an interview with Hickenlooper. “Welcome to my world,” Brown said.

Wisecracks pour out of him, some of them not so safe. The first time I mentioned the state’s $1 billion budget gap, he quipped: “You’re nobody if you don’t have $1 billion. I mean, my biggest fear is that we get a big kick-up in the economy and suddenly it’s only $800 million. Then who am I? On the list of governors, I’ve become second tier!”

Many Coloradans outside the Denver area don’t yet have a full sense of this side of Hickenlooper, because his campaign for governor didn’t subject him to particularly intense scrutiny. The most fearsome of his potential Republican rivals lost his primary after being accused of plagiarism, and the two conservatives who remained in the race squabbled largely with each other. Kenneth Bickers, chairman of the political science department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says he routinely talks of Hickenlooper’s victory as “winning without running, which is not technically true, but it’s substantively true. He didn’t travel the state heavily. He ran feel-good, clever commercials largely devoid of content.”

Republicans still have a slight edge over Democrats in voter registration in Colorado, and in the 2010 midterms, Coloradans sent four Republicans and three Democrats to the U.S. House. That was an abrupt change from 2008, when the split was five to two in favor of Democrats and Barack Obama handily won the state.

But both senators from Colorado are Democrats, as is the outgoing governor, Bill Ritter Jr. One of those senators, Michael Bennet, whose 2010 race against Ken Buck was among the nation’s closest and most aggressively fought, says that instances when his party has prevailed in Colorado can be attributed largely to individual candidates’ taking a less vitriolic tack than their opponents. “What a politician needs to be successful here is to not land in the middle of partisan political battles,” he says.

Hickenlooper doesn’t like to. When I asked him what he thought of the tax-cut compromise President Obama struck with Congressional Republicans, he said that without inside knowledge of all the legislative wrangling involved, he wouldn’t dare criticize it. He volunteered that he had similarly withheld criticism of most of President Bush’s actions.

But he did go on to question one aspect of the Obama presidency — in order, tellingly, to make clear that he values consensus over a crusade. “Rather than going to health care first, I would have gone, I think, to transportation infrastructure,” Hickenlooper said, explaining that he noticed through his work with the U.S. Conference of Mayors that the issue had moved from a Democratic preoccupation to a more bipartisan one. “Here’s something everybody cares about. Maybe we focus on that to build bridges.” Was the double entendre deliberate?

“I think the Obama administration,” he added, “saw a higher need to make history.”

Hickenlooper grew up in a family of four kids in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and what defined his childhood was loss. His mother, Anne, was widowed twice by the age of 40; the father of her two older children died before John was born, and his own father, a steel-mill executive, died of intestinal cancer when John was just 7. Anne was left to raise her two sons and two daughters on her own, and she scrimped to make sure there was enough for their educations but never griped about that or anything else.

“If you’re trying to understand John on a deep psychological level, she’s the most important person,” says his wife, Helen Thorpe, a journalist. Thorpe adds that his mother, who died in 2003, “was relentlessly cheerful every day and never showed any hint of despair or self-pity or anything like that to her children.” As a result, she says, her husband “doesn’t have any time for anybody who complains” and maintains an optimism that’s “an act of will.” He told me that if he starts a day in what feels like a funk, he rallies himself by concentrating on a line he remembers from the movie “All That Jazz.” “It’s show time!” he says to himself. Moods, he observed, are viral, and a good one “allows people to put down their defenses.”

Although he portrays himself as a fumbling dork through his school years — poor vision, persistent acne — others recall a spirited and even moderately athletic kid. “He was provocative, is one way to put it — always pushing buttons, lots of childhood pranks,” says Stewart Alcorn, a cousin who was more like a sibling, just one year behind him at the Haverford School, which Hickenlooper attended from 7th through 12th grades and where he played soccer, basketball and baseball.

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Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican lawyer in Washington who was friendly with him at Haverford, says that while he wasn’t a leader, everybody liked him, adding: “Was he the most likely person to go into politics? No. Does it shock me he did? No.”

It took him some time to get there. He was at Wesleyan for 10 years in all, a do-gooder and a good-timer whose meandering path to a master’s was punctuated with stints helping poor farmers in Costa Rica, founding a free community health clinic close to the university’s campus and learning how to brew beer in Maine. Mild forms of dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder sometimes slowed him down, he says, though friends recall an intensity of energy that more than made up for any burdens.

With his geology degree in hand, he got a job with a big oil company in Denver in 1981 but was laid off after five years, during a downturn in the oil industry. He used part of his severance to buy a red ’67 Chevy convertible, took a road trip to see his brother in Berkeley, Calif., and, while there, happened to go to the Triple Rock, an early microbrewery. Denver didn’t have anything like it. Hickenlooper, in need of a project and a new career, decided to fix that.

From relatives, friends, strangers and a bank, he rounded up $575,000 and constructed the Wynkoop, named for a nearby street, in one of several neglected turn-of-the-century brick warehouses in lower downtown, which is known as LoDo. He chose the neighborhood for the cheap rent, but he also sensed potential for an urban renaissance there. He even moved into a LoDo loft. And as he restyled or bought other restaurants in LoDo and elsewhere, he spearheaded a few business and residential projects around the Wynkoop. “He wasn’t the first to buy property in that part of downtown and develop it,” says Joyce Meskis, who owns the Tattered Cover, a Denver bookstore of national renown, and who was his partner in one of those LoDo projects. “But he was one of the most influential. There were obstacles, and he kept at it and kept at it and kept at it.” The area evolved into one of the city’s favored playgrounds, and he became known as one of its patron saints.

He was known, too, for his mischievous streak, which wasn’t confined to those pigs. In 1993, for example, he offered a bounty for a bride. He was 41 and considered one of Denver’s most eligible bachelors, the head of a bar-and-restaurant empire that was growing into other cities and states. (Most of it, including the Wynkoop, he sold after entering politics.) Friends were bugging him about what it would take to get him to the altar. The right woman, he told them. And whoever found her, he added, could claim a $5,000 prize.

This was a spontaneous, half-kidding proposition, made over beers, but a broad circle of acquaintances came to take it seriously. In a year’s time, he went on scores of arranged dates, a procession so relentless he described it to me as “a death march.” The bounty became publicly known — The Rocky Mountain News reported it — and shortly after that, he fielded and accepted an invitation from Phil Donahue to talk about it on his TV show. By then he was seriously involved with someone; Donahue invited her along as well. Donahue speculated on the air that she would probably never say “I do” to her lanky microbrewer, given all the clunky syllables involved in being “Mrs. Hickenlooper.” Hickenlooper shot back: “My mother’s been very happy, thank you very little.”

In January 2002 he finally did marry — a different woman, Thorpe, who kept her own, monosyllabic surname. Although discussion of the bounty had long since ceased, the friend who introduced them remembered it and demanded the reward, in the form of a charitable donation to a school. Hickenlooper paid up and settled down. Today he and Thorpe have an 8-year-old son, Teddy, and a four-bedroom Craftsman house in an old, leafy Denver neighborhood. Thorpe says they probably won’t trade that house for the governor’s mansion, the grandness and formality of which aren’t their style.

Photo

Hickenlooper, left, and friends in 1988 at the Denver microbrewery where he first embraced the philosophy that there’s no percentage at all in making enemies.Credit
Photograph by Kim Allen/Denver Photo Archives

Hickenlooper’s is one of those lives that’s a seemingly endless sequence of colorful anecdotes, going back to his ancestry. One of his forebears was a decorated Civil War general; another forebear was a classical pianist whose husband moved on to Greta Garbo; and his father was a fraternity brother at Cornell University with Kurt Vonnegut, whom Hickenlooper later got to know quite well. His mother’s best friend when he was growing up was Agnes Nixon, the creator of the soap operas “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.” One of his cousins was George Hickenlooper, the movie director who died of an accidental prescription-drug overdose in late October. In George’s recently released movie, “Casino Jack,” John has a cameo as a U.S. senator.

What got him into politics was football. When the Denver Broncos were building a replacement for Mile High Stadium in 2000, he led the opposition to the team’s plan to sell the naming rights, arguing that the “mile high” moniker was profitable branding for Denver. He didn’t really prevail. The Broncos’ new home, financed partly by an investment-management firm, is called Invesco Field at Mile High.

But Hickenlooper found that he enjoyed the soapbox, and friends started whispering “mayor” in his ear. By then he had made several million dollars (“Trust me,” he says, “I’m small rich, not big rich”), was involved in various charities and knew enough movers and shakers to raise money and make a credible go of it. He says that as he thought about the opportunity, he realized that he had never considered government particularly effective or politicians especially altruistic or honorable. That very pessimism, he says, became a reason to jump in. Shouldn’t someone who felt the way he did try to change things, especially if he was in a position to?

He ran as a pro-business, antiwaste populist and outsider. Using the same political ad makers who worked for the former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, he did one TV commercial in which he tried on various footwear, hats and suits, dressing as a cowboy in one scene and Uncle Sam in another, while his voice-over explained: “Everybody says I need better clothes. They want me to look more mayoral. Fact is, I’m not a professional politician.”

He also talked confidently enough about bread-and-butter issues like supporting schools and fighting crime to win endorsements from both Denver dailies, The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News (which has since closed). It didn’t hurt that many reporters had a cheery, beery familiarity with him from the Wynkoop. In a field of seven candidates — none advertising any party affiliation, because Denver city elections are by law nonpartisan — he got 43 percent of the vote, the largest tally by far. And in a runoff with the runner-up, he won 65 percent.

Then he got to work. He recruited an unusually high number of high-powered businesspeople to serve in his administration, but he pruned the overall government work force, a necessity given legal prohibitions against deficit spending. He got tough on police brutality, cut water use, installed a fleet of hundreds of pay-as-you-go public bicycles and exuberantly promoted Denver and Colorado as optimal destinations for corporations and tourists both. During his tenure, the city’s convention business boomed. Democrats gathered in Denver in 2008 to formally nominate Obama, an event that also gave Hickenlooper national exposure.

Two aspects of his administration stand out in particular. To obtain financial wiggle room for teacher salaries, transportation projects and other matters, he repeatedly went to voters and got their consent, as Colorado law requires of mayors and the governor, for sales- and property-tax increases and for taking on limited debt. “He has tax-increase pixie dust,” says Jon Caldara, the president of the Independence Institute, a free-market advocacy group in Colorado. “No politician that I’ve ever worked against has been so successful in selling tax and debt increases as John Hickenlooper.”

His method, in part, was to be humble rather than highhanded. He would spend months and months publicly laying out the economics of the situation, soliciting citizens’ thoughts and pinpointing where the money would go. “Americans — Coloradans — are generous,” he says. “What they hate is waste.”

And he worked hard in each case to figure out the best pitch. He approached the challenge as a salesman. “When he wanted to do the jail campaign” — which meant $378 million for new jail cells and courtrooms — “most of his senior advisers, me included, told him not to do it,” says David Kenney, a Democratic political consultant in Colorado. “It had failed twice before.” Hickenlooper pressed ahead, talking of medieval conditions that undercut Denver’s aspirations to be a world-class city and casting jail crowding as a threat to the safety of corrections officers.

The other, perhaps even more pronounced leitmotif of his mayoralty is how determinedly amiable he tried to be. More so than many Denver mayors before him, he reached out to Colorado government officials and citizens outside of Denver, which had been regarded, as big cities so often are, as an exotically liberal enclave. Bill Owens, the Republican former governor who was in office from 1999 to 2007, recalls, “We’d disagree on lots of issues, but then we’d get together, have a beer and go to a baseball game.” Whenever a blizzard arrived, he and Hickenlooper would talk to make sure the state and city sent employees home at the same early hour. Owens says that as unremarkable as that sounds, he didn’t have that kind of relationship with Hickenlooper’s predecessor, Wellington Webb.

Hickenlooper emphasized issues that weren’t predictably polarizing, spending his energy, for instance, on his battle against homelessness, which he made sure to wage not just with government money but also with privately raised funds, including coins dropped in symbolic parking meters around the city. “He took it out of being a cold bureaucratic enterprise and turned it into something the whole city could rally around,” says Bennet, who was his chief of staff at the start.

When he did step inadvertently into controversy, he stepped quickly back out. Early on he announced, in an ecumenical vein, that the illuminated “Merry Christmas” sign at City Hall would be swapped for one that said “Happy Holidays.” An outcry arose, and he abandoned the idea.

He had his share of trouble and made his share of mistakes: friction with the police department, botched snow removal, questions about whether he was soft on illegal immigration. One negative rap on his mayoralty was that his focus could be fickle and his attention scattershot. Another was that he was so conflict-averse it was sometimes hard to tell where he stood. Council member Brown says that there are times he has wanted to say: “John, you’re not selling fajitas anymore. You’ve got to make some people upset.”

There’s some evidence that Hickenlooper is a fairly classic liberal, Brown says, mentioning the Chinook Fund, a local charitable organization Hickenlooper started in the late 1980s. It has distributed money to Acorn, to a community center for transvestites and transsexuals and to a pro-Palestinian group. And yet, Brown adds, Hickenlooper is adamant, to a degree not usually associated with such liberals, about rooting out government waste.

During my conversations with him, he talked up the fervency of his support for gay civil unions, using the phrase “moral courage” to describe it, but stopped shy of endorsing gay marriage. He said that labor unions get mired in self-preservation but that he’s not antiunion per se. As for energy policy, he told me, “I think we should drill the living daylights out of natural gas and cut regulation” but also labeled himself an environmentalist. The S.U.V. that he and aides use for official mayoral transport isn’t the usual fuel-guzzling Lincoln Navigator or Cadillac Escalade; it’s a much smaller Ford Escape Hybrid.

Hickenlooper, who is 58, says he has no ambitions for higher office. To be more accurate, he says there’s no point in having them, because he’s too unorthodox a Democrat to be recruited for, and supported in, a national race. Still, assuming his first term as governor goes well and he’s re-elected in 2014, it’s hard not to believe that there will be at least a few murmurs from Democratic operatives, and a few stirrings within Hickenlooper himself, about the presidential race of 2016. And it’s just as hard not to wonder if, at some point, an unorthodox, boundary-blurring candidate will be what both parties decide to trot out for a change.

For now his first-term game plan is not known: he was vague with me and also with dozens of reporters and editors at an annual meeting of the Colorado Press Association in Denver. He told the journalists that he was still making key hires and had not yet even read the recommendations of the many transition task forces he created.

He seemed interested mostly in showing his audience a friendly face. When one reporter addressed him as “Governor-elect,” he said, “Governor-elect Hickenlooper — what is that, nine syllables?” His count, maybe not so off-the-cuff, was dead-on. He insisted that reporters take a shortcut. His first name, John, would do.

Frank Bruni is a staff writer for the magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on January 9, 2011, on Page MM24 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Hickenlooper Exception. Today's Paper|Subscribe